Rudram, anuvāka 6 — eldest and youngest, field and threshing-floor
The popular claimThe eldest and the youngest, the first-born and the last, the one in the fields and the one on the threshing-floor, the armed and the armoured.
The fifth anuvāka placed Rudra along the scales of size, age and water. The sixth places him along birth-order, farmland, sound and war. Fifteen clauses, two names each.
Birth-order
Namo jyeṣṭhāya ca kaniṣṭhāya ca. — To the eldest and the youngest.
Namaḥ pūrvajāya cāparajāya ca. — To the first-born and the later-born.
Namo madhyamāya cāpagalbhāya ca. — To the middle one and the immature. Apagalbha — Sāyaṇa: the one not yet grown, or, by another reading, the one without boldness.
Namo jaghanyāya ca budhniyāya ca. — To the hindmost and the one at the root. Budhniya — from budhna, the base; Sāyaṇa reads it as the one in the depths.
Eldest, youngest, first, last, middle, unripe, hindmost, root: the god is every position in a lineage, which for a Vedic family was the whole map of who one was.
Movement and place
Namaḥ sobhyāya ca pratisaryāya ca. — To the one in the mixed and the one who goes against. Sobhya — Sāyaṇa: of the world of mixed beings; pratisarya — the one who moves back, the returner; both readings are argued.
Namo yāmyāya ca kṣemyāya ca. — To the one in Yama's world and the one in safety. Yāmya — belonging to Yama, the dead; kṣemya — of peace, of rest. Death and safety, one clause.
Nama urvaryāya ca khalyāya ca. — To the one in the sown field and the one on the threshing-floor. Urvarā — cultivated land; khala — the floor where grain is beaten. Rudra is the crop from planting to harvest.
Namaḥ ślokyāya cāvasānyāya ca. — To the one in the verse and the one at the end. Ślokya — of the śloka, the hymn; avasānya — of the close, the conclusion. The commentators read this as the god in the recitation itself and in its ending.
Namo vanyāya ca kakṣyāya ca. — To the one in the forest and the one in the thicket.
Namaḥ śravāya ca pratiśravāya ca. — To the sound and the echo. Śrava — what is heard; pratiśrava — the answering sound. A Vedic clause about acoustics: Rudra is the call and the hill that gives it back.
The warrior
Nama āśuṣeṇāya cāśurathāya ca. — To the one with the swift army and the swift chariot.
Namaḥ śūrāya cāvabhindate ca. — To the hero and the breaker of lines. Avabhindat — who splits apart, the one who breaks the enemy formation.
Namo varmiṇe ca varūthine ca. — To the armoured and the one with the shield-wall. Varūtha — the chariot-guard, the protective screen.
Namo bilmine ca kavacine ca. — To the helmeted and the cuirassed. Bilma — Sāyaṇa: the helmet; kavaca — the body armour.
Namaḥ śrutāya ca śrutasenāya ca. — To the famous and the one of famous army. Śruta — heard of, renowned.
What the section adds
Three things. The birth-order pairs make Rudra the whole of a family. The farmland pair makes him the whole of a crop. The sound pair — call and echo — is the closest the Rudram comes to naming the god as the recitation's own acoustics, and ślokyāya cāvasānyāya puts him in the verse and at its close. Then the warrior pairs, which the seventh will continue with the drum.
The chant
Chanters mark the sixth anuvāka by its opening — namo jyeṣṭhāya — and a listener can find their place in the Namakam by it: roughly a third of the way through, with the terrain pairs still to come. In the Ekādaśinī, where the Namakam is chanted eleven times, this is the section after which the first Camakam anuvāka is inserted on the sixth pass.
What this page does not say
It does not choose between the readings of sobhya and pratisarya, which differ across Sāyaṇa and Bhaṭṭabhāskara, and it does not claim the section describes anything beyond what it lists. It opens the thirty names so that jyeṣṭhāya ca kaniṣṭhāya ca is heard as what it is: the eldest and the youngest, and everything between.
Source — Taittiriya Samhita 4.5.6 (Namakam, sixth anuvaka), Krishna Yajurveda; Sayana's bhashya on the Taittiriya; Bhattabhaskara's commentary on the Rudram
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